She was saving almost all of her salary, and on the weekends when she supposedly visited her family—Mrs. Cannon and her plump nondescript husband came to stay discontentedly in the guest room on these occasions—she went to New York. Here she wandered the streets and gazed into the windows of stores she knew only from dazzling advertisements; once, at Bonwit Teller’s, she bought a four-dollar rope of pearls and carried the distinctive little bag about with her all that day and the next.
And always, as she had from the day she arrived at the Stevensons’, she observed. She stayed at an inexpensive hotel and ate at glaringly lit places with smudged plastic-covered menus, and in between she sauntered into the lobbies of good hotels, sat down with the casual attitude of someone meeting a guest there, and drank in her surroundings. As usual, she discarded the men; it was the women she watched. She saw how they arrived at hotels and how, leaving, they met the problem of the bellboy and the doorman. Puzzlingly, the lone women did not have the flustered, self-conscious air Celia connected with such a state; they walked with as much poise as though the hotel had been especially built for them.
She listened to scraps of conversation to take back to Stedman Circle and muse over later: “Well, of course, that was when refugees were smart. Now it’s retarded children.”
“—terribly upset, because after all that he turned out to be Sagittarius and you know what that means.”
“She’s dragged that poor man to so many of those Hunt Club affairs that he can’t even jog any more. He canters.”
When Celia returned to the tall old house at six o’clock on Sunday evening, Mrs. Cannon, almost friendly with the prospect of release, would ask perfunctorily, “Family all well, Celia?” and Celia would reply, “Yes, thank you, Mrs. Cannon.”
“Ma’am” had gone forever out of her life.
She was confident that her conversation with her employer in his study would bear fruit, and she was right. When she was removing the remains of his tapioca pudding and coffee that evening, he said, “I’ve been thinking over what we talked about this morning, Celia. This is a big house for one old man, and I don’t see any reason why”—he appeared to have difficulty in swallowing here, but recovered himself —“you shouldn’t have a few young people in occasionally. You’d let me know in advance, of course.”
So that he could be spirited away upstairs: that was implicit.
“Oh, of course,” said Celia, over a leap of exultation so violent that it was almost physically painful. She gave him a level look out of her dark eyes. “It would make such a difference to me, Mr. Tomlinson, but . . . I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was taking advantage of you.”
Like Mrs. Cannon, said this little pause. Or even friendly Dr. Fowler.
A faint hint of what might have been wryness crept into Mr. Tomlinson’s polite old eyes and was gone at once. “I see no reason why our arrangements should concern anyone else at all,” he said mildly, and, less than a year after she had first entered it, Celia became quasi-mistress of 4 Stedman Circle. It was a situation with disaster for her inherent in it; she was saved by the native shrewdness that goes hand in hand with personal ambition—that and, early in June, the simple fact of a torn pocketbook lining.
Five
IT was not surprising that Celia’s occasional entertaining, with her employer notified in advance and firmly kept apart from it, went undetected. Mr. Tomlinson did not know any of his immediate neighbors—it was a long time since he had ventured out of his own front door—but he was not a recluse, and cars parked in front of No. 4 might, with its narrow frontage, have been overflows from No. 2 or No. 6 in any case.
Dr. Fowler’s professional calls were never in the evening, and Celia was in command of the telephone; she could always tell a caller, if she had plans of her own, that Mr. Tomlinson had retired for the night. Her habit of cleaning living room and kitchen before going to bed was so ingrained by years of service as a maid that Mrs. Meggs was none the wiser, and if Mrs. Cannon had any spies in Stedman Circle, they slept.
Celia was modest with her guest list, out of necessity. There was Willis, and Willis’s cousin and his wife on a visit from Arkansas, and a couple from a nearby town who were friends of the cousin. These new additions, who might have tended to be raucous in other surroundings, were muted almost to dumbness by the lemony, camphory elegance of the house. They looked upon Willis with respect as the future husband of the heir to all this, a fact of which Celia grew sharply and unpleasantly aware.
She had no intention of marrying Willis; in her trips to New York and her observations there, she had far outgrown his wavy profile and elbow nudges and ridiculous ring. She would have to do something, but in the meantime she was caught in a trap of her own devising. She would not have hesitated now to identify her lofty position (“Poor old soul, I had to promise that I wouldn’t leave him”) but the die was cast there and it would not do to have conflicting stories in a town as small as this.
It was certainly true that, in a manner that only a psychiatrist might have unraveled, Mr. Tomlinson had grown to love his chains. But there were sounder reasons too for his willing thralldom: Celia fixed his meals exactly as he liked them and
